impute.visibility: Estimates each person's personal visibility based on their...

Description

Estimates each person's personal visibility based on their self-reported degree and the
number of their (direct) recruits. It uses the time the person was recruited as a factor in
determining the number of recruits they produce.

Arguments

rds.data

An rds.data.frame

max.coupons

The number of recruitment coupons distributed to each
enrolled subject (i.e. the maximum number of recruitees for any subject).
By default it is taken by the attribute or data, else the maximum recorded number of coupons.

type.impute

The type of imputation based on the conditional distribution.
It can be of type distribution,mode,median, or mean
with the first , the default, being a random draw from the conditional distribution.

recruit.time

vector; An optional value for the data/time that the person was interviewed.
It needs to resolve as a numeric vector with number of elements the number
of rows of the data with non-missing values of the network variable. If it
is a character name of a variable in the data then that variable is used.
If it is NULL then the sequence number of the recruit in the data is used.
If it is NA then the recruitment is not used in the model.
Otherwise, the recruitment time is used in the model to better predict the visibility of the person.

include.tree

logical; If TRUE,
augment the reported network size by the number of recruits and one for the recruiter (if any).
This reflects a more accurate value for the visibility, but is not the self-reported degree.
In particular, it typically produces a positive visibility (compared to a possibility zero self-reported degree).

unit.scale

numeric; If not NULL it sets the numeric value of the scale parameter
of the distribution of the unit sizes.
For the negative binomial, it is the multiplier on the variance of the negative binomial
compared to a Poisson (via the Poisson-Gamma mixture representation). Sometimes the scale is
unnaturally large (e.g. 40) so this give the option of fixing it (rather than using
the MLE of it). The model is fit with the parameter fixed at this passed value.

unit.model

The type of distribution for the unit sizes.
It can be of nbinom, meaning a negative binomial.
In this case, unit.scale is the multiplier
on the variance of the negative binomial compared to a Poisson of the same mean.
The alternative is cmp, meaning a Conway-Maxwell-Poisson distribution.
In this case, unit.scale
is the scale parameter compared to a Poisson of the same mean (values less than one mean
under-dispersed and values over one mean over-dispersed). The default is cmp.

optimism

logical; If TRUE then add a term to the model allowing
the (proportional) inflation of the self-reported degrees relative to the unit sizes.

guess

vector; if not NULL, the initial parameter values for the MLE fitting.

reflect.time

logical; If FALSE then the recruit.time is the time before the
end of the study (instead of the time since the survey started or chronological time).

maxit

integer; The maximum number of iterations in the likelihood maximization. By default it is 100.

K

integer; The maximum degree. All self-reported degrees above this are recorded as being at least K.
By default it is the 95th percentile of the self-reported network sizes.

Examples

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## Not run: data(fauxmadrona)# The next line fits the model for the self-reported personal# network sizes and imputes the personal network sizes # It may take up to 60 seconds.
visibility <-impute.visibility(fauxmadrona)# frequency of estimated personal visibilitytable(visibility)## End(Not run)